Near Sydney’s Circular Quay sits the Hitler Bar. The door sign has Hitler’s name in Germanic script on a swastika background. Similar nazi era iconography decorates the menus.
Alright, not surprisingly, there is no Hitler Bar. Instead what overlooks Sydney Harbour is the Lenin Bar, replete with the nostalgic/ironic hip communist hammer, sickle and Soviet star kitsch.
This is strange because in overall scope, communism presents as a greater man-made humanitarian catastrophe than nazism, or almost certainly any other ism.
The politically motivated body count of the Soviet Union alone at least rivals, and depending on what you count, easily surpasses the Third Reich.
Beginning with Lenin’s Red Terror and moving on to Stalin’s purges millions were killed, tortured and sent to hellish Gulags.
Stalin’s relocations, collectivisations and apparently engineered famines, generally aimed at ethnic groups and cultural minorities, almost certainly surpass the toll of those killed in Holocaust.
However this is not to diminish the uniquely surrealistic horror of the Holocaust, where the technical and bureaucratic means of modern industrialised states were fashioned into a mechanism for systematic slaughter.
There is, of course, also the small matter of World War II, which for Australians Hitler started by invading Poland.
Except that the invasion of Poland was a joint exercise by Germany and the Soviet Union.
The Germans then attacked Western Europe, while the Russians consolidated their empire over subject peoples in the east.
The co-occupiers of greater Eurasia remained friendly until Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded.
When the Soviets eventually advanced to Berlin their hit squads mopped up any suspected political opposition among the “liberated peoples”, just as the Gestapo and SS had a few years earlier.
Life under either the nazi or the communist state-centralized systems of terror and control seemed remarkably similar, except the uniforms were a different colour.
Communism has proved more durable and perhaps this aids its acceptability.
Grudgingly most of the surviving socialist democratic republics have retreated from the hard core ideology to help them survive, with North Korea being the outlying pariah.
Astonishingly though some who advocated the more extreme versions of communism still attract hero worship.
For example, there is popular T-shirt emblem Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
Che was a disciple of China’s Chairman Mao.
On sheer body count Mao is quite probably the greatest political murderer the world has ever seen, although someone like Pol Pot might trump him on a per capita basis.
Steven Soderbergh’s new two-part biographical film, Che, deals with the beret wearer’s revolutionary life in Cuba and Boliva.
Predictably it doesn’t show Che as Castro’s hatchetman, enthusiastically arranging firing squads or how his attempts to collectivise Cuban agriculture on Maoist lines was inevitably ruinous.
No Hollywood heavyweight would seriously portray a dedicated nazi as an unabashedly romantic hero, let alone in Che’s characteristic Jesus martyr-style poses in the film’s publicity materials.
Nazi ideology, based on a ridiculous pseudo-science of racial superiority, is now viewed as irredeemably wicked.
By contrast, no matter how bad communism has been in practice, many think its ideas and ideals are noble and thus should not be abandoned.
No doubt this belief derives a motivating power of holy indignation from the world’s many undoubted grave injustices.
The perceived good intentions of communism attract a multitude of apologists, who invariably say communism would work if only it was tried properly or had the historically proper conditions etc, etc.
Certainly the idea of universal equality under the dictatorship of the formerly oppressed (as opposed to the racially advantaged) sounds admirable.
Unless you realise the oppressed may not actually be inherently more virtuous, just because they are oppressed.
Also universal equality may mean, as it often seems to, a levelling down to the lowest common denominator, rather than an elevation of the human spirit.
Ultimately the trouble with an all-encompassing utopian ideology, like communism, is that it simply does not take into account that humans can’t be conveniently fitted to a blueprint of social perfectibility.
Or as Immanuel Kant put it:“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
For believers it’s always the people at fault, never the plan.
For the really true believers they would rather see the people thrown away than the plan.
Lenin’s communist legacy may not be more evil, per se, than nazism but it is certainly more dangerous exactly because it holds out the chimera of a perfectible world based on supposedly noble ideals.
Thankfully except for a few pockets of malign misfits nazism has largely been consigned to Trotsky’s “dustbin of history”.
Hopefully communism will one day be equally discredited but at least it is being swept into the same receptacle.
However it might be better if communism is finally buried, at least as deeply as its millions of victims are.
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